Raves, rants, views, reviews, comments and experiences of a Common IT Man.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

The case of missing panel items in Ubuntu 9.04

I noticed that the icons/items for battery status & wi-fi signal were missing from the panel in my desktop for Ubuntu 9.04. These had just vanished into thin air without my doing anything at all! Here's how I got them back...
The System > Help and Support > Internet and Networks menu was the first place I tried to glean some info from. It just mentioned that I need to work with the Network Manager icon in the System Notification area which I found out is just another panel in the desktop. This still lead me nowhere on how get the missing panel items back!

So just to try out a hunch, I right-clicked on the panel next to the calendar applet and selected the Add to Panel... option. It showed me a whole lot of items that I could add to the panel and one of them was Notification Area. Adding this to the panel immediately brought up the NetworkManager Applet icon and the Power Manager icon in this area. With this, the missing panel items were back to their respective places.

However, the Power Manager icon kept coming and going at it's own will. So I added another panel item called Battery Charge Monitor which thankfully continued to stick to the panel and did not disappear!